Re: There is no .NET in Vista Code?

Chris Burrows wrote:
"Captain Jake" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:4420229f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Lurkio" <spam?@no.thanks> wrote in message news:442021cb$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Excessive download dependencies will put
a prospective customer off giving your application a fair look.

Indeed. Anything that requires additional effort or connectivity is a potential fatal design flaw in a demo version.


EXACTLY. That is why I like 100k .NET downloads instead of 1 Mb Delphi downloads.

But the whole point is that you will more than likely
*never* be able to assume that your customer already
has the version of .NET installed that your application
requires. Not while the framework remains offered as a
separate redistributable.

If, from Vista onwards, M$ stopped releasing .NET as
a separate entity from their OS releases (except as,
say, compatibility downloads for older Windows versions)
and .NET became a fully fledged, built-in subsystem
peer of Win32/Win64 then your point would eventually
stand as the newer OS releases took over market share...
I had hoped that they would eventually go down that road
- AFAIK it might even have been in their heads before
the Vista re-write - but I now see no evidence /at all/
that they are actually even moving towards this.

The potential .NET compatibility issues that you are trying to invent are no more of a problem than we have had with Delphi incompatibilities with different versions of IE (remember the imagelist hassles?)

The whole raison d’être of the ability to tie your
..NET application to a /specific/ framework version
was to allow M$ sufficient legroom such that they
don't have to guarantee backwards compatibility
between framework versions. If you tie up your code
to a specific version, you /must/ always prepare to
ship that version.

Alternatively, if you did choose to allow your
application to "float up" to use whatever the latest
version of the framework is installed on the target
machine then you will probably either get shafted
because the version the customer has is /older/ than
the one you developed against or, alternatively, it
is a /newer/ framework version that has moved the
goalposts in some undetermined way that will break
your app.

Even if you strike it lucky and the version you coded
against is actually already installed, a later version
of the framework which is installed by another
application can (and will!) break yours when your app
floats up to use that version. I've seen such things
happen first hand and that was when only /two/ versions
of the framework (1.0 and 1.1) were out in the wild!

IMO, the whole floating up thing is a disaster without
the safety net of guaranteed backwards compatibility.
But, as the chap in the other thread who is having
nightmares converting his ASP.NET 1.1 site to ASP.NET
2.0 might testify, that old backward compatibility
religion seems to have gone right out of fashion at
Redmond... :-)
.

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